12,000 Years of Human Curiosity across 13 Milestones

We built, we counted, we played, but most of all, we were looking up. In what is now Germany, we crafted the Nebra Sky Disk, the oldest known depiction of the cosmos. A bronze disc, ritually buried along with swords and tools, it shows 32 stars, a full moon or sun, and a crescent moon. 

The Nebra Sky Disk portrays our first glance into the universe, and our earliest collective dream of exploring it. 

Not yet having the tools and the craft to travel to the stars, we created new generations who would eventually realize that dream. The necessary step, however, was not looking up, but looking down. 

In ancient Egypt, a papyrus described the most ancient form of pregnancy tests: a woman could urinate on wheat and barley seeds, and how they sprouted would reveal if a child was coming. Tested centuries later, it worked about 70 percent of the time. 

New children arrived, and they were thirsty for knowledge. One of these children would grow into Ashurbanipal, the remarkable king of Assyria, who often boasted of the breadth and depth of his learning.

In his capital of Nineveh (now northern Iraq), he gathered a vast collection of knowledge. His library, unearthed between the 1840s and 1930s, contained more than 30,000 clay tablets written in cuneiform. Some recorded interpretations of omens from the gods, but Ashurbanipal also had a special interest in literary texts. 

Many of the tablets even bear marks declaring they belonged to the king’s palace, the most ancient kind of library stamps.

As our body of knowledge grew and our learning became more complex, we realized a crucial element was missing. A new number.

In India, thinkers such as Aryabhata and Brahmagupta transformed zero from a simple placeholder into a number in its own right, calling it shunya, the Sanskrit word for emptiness.

From that small circle grew modern mathematics. Negative numbers, new calculations, and eventually the foundations of algebra, algorithms, and calculus all followed. 

Sometimes the most powerful invention is nothing at all.

From nothing came everything. With new lenses, the tiniest parts of the universe could be made vastly larger.

The first compound microscope was invented around 1590. But it was the Dutch tradesman, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who revealed its true power. Using lenses of his own making, capable of magnifying objects up to 300 times, he became the first self-taught scientist to observe bacteria and other microscopic life forms.

And in 1608, we ventured into the macrocosm.

The Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lipperhey invented an instrument that brought distant objects nearer. Soon after, Galileo Galilei built his own telescope and turned it toward the sky. He made astonishing discoveries: the surface of the Moon was rough and irregular, resembling Earth’s terrain; Jupiter had four moons of its own; and the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe.

We gathered at temples, settled in cities, counted our goods, dreamed of the stars, invented zero, and built lenses powerful enough to see the unimaginably small and the unbelievably far. Sooner or later, we would try to connect our increasingly curious minds together. 

In 1969, the first large-scale computer network, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), was switched on in the United States. On October 29, a student at UCLA attempted to send the first message to a computer at Stanford. He typed the letters “L” and “O”... and the computer crashed before he could finish the word LOGIN. 

The network recovered later that day. The message went through. And it became the backbone of the modern internet. 

Each of these stories is a crucial link in our unbroken chain of curiosity, stretching from our earliest steps on the Earth to the dreams we now send forward to farthest reaches of the universe. 

• We first gathered at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, and the earliest city arose at Tell Brak, Syria. 
  

• We counted for the first time in Babylon, played one of the earliest board games, Senet, in Egypt, and recorded the cosmos on the Nebra Sky Disk in Germany.
  

• The first pregnancy tests appeared in Egypt, and the earliest libraries were built in Nineveh, now Iraq, under Ashurbanipal.
  

• Zero was invented in India, microscopes revealed the unseen to the Dutch Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and telescopes revealed the heavens to the Italian Galileo Galilei.
  

• The first large-scale computer network, ARPANET, connected minds and machines, extending the unbroken chain of human curiosity from soil to stars.